Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Texas Polygamy Raid May Pose Risk

The Texas compound of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where the police removed 416 girls.Credit
Tony Gutierrez/Associated Press

ELDORADO, Tex. — The raid last week on a polygamist compound here is complicating law enforcement efforts in Utah and Arizona, where there are far more offshoot Mormon polygamists but where the authorities try to avoid such large-scale confrontations.

Officials in those states have dealt for many years with the tangled and delicate problem of opening communications with polygamist groups while also winning the confidence of girls who are taken as under-age wives. The Texas authorities say the raid here was prompted by a 16-year-old who called on a cellphone from the compound in a cry for help.

But the raid’s scale — 416 children were removed, making it the largest raid in more than a half century in the West — and the fact that the 16-year-old has not been identified, has sharply eroded trust in the government among polygamist groups, according to law enforcement officials in several states.

“They were reaching out, opening up,” Mark L. Shurtleff, the attorney general in Utah, said of the polygamist communities. “Now they’ve kind of pulled back. Everybody’s going to wait and see how this thing plays out in Texas.”

Mr. Shurtleff, a Republican who has led rescue and prosecution efforts in his state, emphasized he was not criticizing the authorities in Texas; a complaint came, he said, and officials had to act. Nonetheless, he said, it will be harder to persuade another under-age, coerced bride to come forward if the message resonates that Texas was not able to protect or identify the girl here after her call.

“If we can’t promise protection, they’re not going to talk,” Mr. Shurtleff said in telephone interview.

Texas state officials said Friday at a news conference that they believed that the girl was among the children taken into protective custody, but that she had not identified herself so they could not be sure.

Arizona’s attorney general, Terry Goddard, a Democrat, was also blunt about the possible consequences of the raid.

“We’re in uncharted territory,” Mr. Goddard said. “The last time something of this scale happened was Short Creek, and connections with the communities broke off for almost 50 years after that. I personally think we will have to redouble our efforts now.”

In both Utah and Arizona there have been recent cases in which the authorities have won the confidence of under-age coerced brides who have cooperated with state prosecutions, most notably in the criminal case last year against Warren S. Jeffs, the prominent polygamist leader in Utah. In other instances, the authorities in those states have managed to persuade polygamist families to allow state officials and social services into their communities.

In the world of fundamentalist polygamy, the phrase “Short Creek” has resonated since 1953, when the police descended on the twin communities of Hildale, Utah, and Short Creek, Ariz., now Colorado City. More than 30 men were arrested, and hundreds of children were rounded up and taken into custody. Psychological walls went up as the communities retreated and taught the young to believe that the government was the enemy.

“The state became the bogyman,” Mr. Goddard said.

Since then, the problems associated with fundamentalist polygamy, especially the practice of taking under-age wives, have become more glaring, and the numbers of polygamists have grown, as well, elevating and complicating the issue. Though still small in the number of participants — the biggest group has an estimated 10,000 members — the issues are often front-page politics in the West.

The Texas lawmaker who represents Eldorado, Representative Harvey Hilderbran, a Republican, said the authorities had been looking for a tool, if not a spark, to combat the particular form of polygamy that arrived here in 2003, when the group’s members came from Utah and Arizona.

Mr. Hilderbran led the push in 2005 to raise the marriage age in Texas to 16 from 14, a legislative process in which Mr. Shurtleff, the Utah prosecutor, came to testify in support of the change.

“We’ve been fighting this for awhile, trying to do something about it,” Mr. Hilderbran said. “But we needed a complaint. You can’t just say: ‘Golly, I can’t get into that ranch, I bet you lots of awful stuff is going on in there.’ ”

Mr. Hilderbran said that based on recent conversations with law enforcement officials, they had been poised to respond if and when a cry for help came.

“There was some anticipation, at least some preparation,” Mr. Hilderbran said.

“There was great concern not to have something like Waco,” he added, referring to the raid on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco in 1993, in which more than 80 people were killed. “So we want to know how to handle it, to have our ducks in a row.”

“I think our agencies and law enforcement did a good job,” Mr. Hilderbran said of the raid last week.

Mr. Shurtleff has become deeply identified with the polygamy issue, taking his advocacy even beyond Utah’s borders.

“They and their wives were saying, ‘I know this person, this legislator, and I’m going to use our influence, to try and get something done over there,’ ” he said.

Mr. Shurtleff said he had no idea whether that day in Austin influenced the events of last week, when 700 state law enforcement and child welfare officials arrived here and surrounded the Yearning for Zion ranch, as the F.L.D.S. compound here is called.

Mr. Hilderbran, the legislator, said he was unaware of any recent pressure to take action beyond the girl’s call. The business executive who organized the event in Austin did not return calls on Friday.

In Eldorado, a dusty and remote spot in the Hill Country where goat herds line the sides of the road and free-range chickens are not just a description on a supermarket package, tolerance for the secretive sect members — mixed with suspicion — seems to have been the norm.

The newcomers kept to themselves, neither giving to the community nor asking much in return. But that is a trait most people here respect, no matter the rumors of what went on behind closed gates.

“They haven’t bothered anybody,” said Jerry Swift, a sheep, goat and cattle rancher. When they came to Eldorado to buy supplies, which was rare, the men dressed in work clothes, “not any differently than us,” Mr. Swift said.

Members of the sect have practiced “plural marriage,” as they call it, since they split more than a century ago from the mainstream Mormon church, which is based in Salt Lake City.

Both groups look back to Joseph Smith as their founder and first prophet. But the main branch of the faith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, disavowed polygamy more than a century ago and excommunicates polygamists today.

That Utah and Arizona would take leadership in combating polygamy is not surprising, because those states also have two of the highest percentages of mainstream Mormons in the nation, many of whom bristle at the long-outdated association with polygamy. That animosity complicates interfaith relations and politics.

A more immediate question is how the history of the Texas raid will be told in the cloistered places of polygamists where sermons and oral tradition rule and where television, radio and newspapers are all alien.

“We have no control over their internal communications,” said Mr. Goddard, the Arizona attorney general. “And right now they feel they’re a target.”

Gretel C. Kovach contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Polygamy Raid in West Texas May Pose a Risk for the Authorities Elsewhere. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe